Endangered Species and the Stuff We Buy, All Mapped Out

A map showing what researchers call the biodiversity footprint of United States trade. Purple indicates areas where terrestrial species are threatened, and blue indicates marine wildlife. The darker the area, the more serious the threat.

Daniel Moran and Keiichiro Kanemoto

January 6, 2017

Trilobites

By JOANNA KLEIN

The things that people buy and consume can have deadly consequences for the planet’s wildlife. Now a series of maps show where it’s hurting the most.

Daniel Moran, an industrial ecologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and his colleague Keiichiro Kanemoto from Shinshu University in Japan, developed the maps for a paper published on Wednesday in Nature Ecology & Evolution to illustrate the impact of what they call a biodiversity footprint. Dr. Moran sees this idea as an early step toward creating tools that will allow nations to one day regulate biodiversity through trade, as some currently do with carbon.

People like stuff, but unsustainable sourcing of that stuff has been damaging to the planet’s biodiversity. In the last 500 years, around 1,000 animals that we know of have gone extinct, mainly because of habitat destruction. Estimates vary, but the rate of extinction today is somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times as high as it was when humans didn’t exist, scientists say.

To visualize the link between global trade and its environmental impact, the maps connect the supply chains of traded commodities in 187 countries with 6,803 animals classified as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and BirdLife International. It looked at the 166 threats stemming from human activity that affect each animal and tracked where commodities resulting from that activity eventually end up.

The regions with the biggest impact were the United States, the European Union and Japan. The European Union and the United States pose especially big threats to marine life in Southeast Asia, where wildlife has been hit hard by nearly every country in the world. In the areas most under threat, rich biodiversity converges with heavy economic activity. Generally, that excludes the United States and Europe, where biodiversity has already been heavily reduced by human populations.

To help reduce the damage, consumers can demand more sustainably sourced goods with adequate labeling, Dr. Moran said. Most of the impact comes from food and fiber products like palm oil, unsustainably produced coffee and tea, paper, lumber, and cotton.

But the map has its limits, and doesn’t track the density of threats to any specific species tied to any particular production site.